Unfortunately Rust is making the exact same mistake.
Edit: It focuses too much on the language instead of the ecosystem.
Edit: It focuses too much on the language instead of the ecosystem.
2. Rust has improved its compiler performance by >3x in the last 5 years.
3. Rust hasn't gotten any major new language feature in the last 6 years. Most language improvement is improving orthogonality of existing features.
4. Rust has an excellent backwards compatibility story also right from the start. Code/libraries written in 2015 can be still compiled and used together with code from 2025.
5. Rust has a serious backing from all major IDE / editor providers.
6. Rust has integrates easily with other languages and ecosystems. It's easier to call Rust from Python than to call Scala from Python. It's easier and more performant to call C from Rust than to call C from Scala. Things like that. It's sad that Scala even struggled with interoperability with Java; which should theoretically be easy as it is the same platform.
Seriously, doesn't look to me like the same mistakes. It's actually quite opposite.
Rust also ships with a functioning epoch/edition system that makes it feasible to rework existing language features for improved generality, elegance etc. without losing backward compatibility. I'm not sure if Scala has anything like that.
Also, the nightly/stable split in Rust means that most new features don't reach the final adoption stage unless there's a very real consensus about their design. A lot of effort is made to get rid of incidental complexity wherever feasible, before the new features are actually stabilized.
Most language implementations that "haven't gotten any major new language feature in the last 6 years" would be described as broadly stagnant or stale, but Rust is quite different.
Cargo is a really good tool, but I wouldn't say it is 10x better than SBT.On the other hand, Scala can be used with different build tools: Maven, Gradle, Mill. With Rust you have no choice(or I'm not aware of). Rust-analyzer is better than metals, can't argue with that...
>Rust has improved its compiler performance by >3x in the last 5 years
Rust compiler is very slow. I can't imagine what compilation time was 5 years ago, but even now, it is incredibly slow, even compared to "slow" Scala compiler(which is no longer true). I'm working on a little project with bevy, and even on such small project compilation time sucks. You can't compare it with Scala, it's just completely different experience.
>Rust hasn't gotten any major new language feature in the last 6 years.
That's not true. Rust team handles these changes correctly. Rust has concept of "Editions", and every 3 years new edition introduces significant changes. I really like how editions work, it's a great way to maintain backwards compat.
>4 Mostly agree
>5 Fully agree
>It's easier and more performant to call C from Rust than to call C from Scala.
Yep, but it's not Scala but the JVM limitation. JNI sucks, but there is an effort to improve that (project Panama).
Overall, both Scala and Rust are great languages. Rust team has addressed many typical issues from the beginning. Scala had its mistakes, but moving in the right direction.
There's plenty of old modules in the Python standard library that hardly any one uses. But removing them would break backwards compatibility guarantees. The Rust project has decided that they want to keep the standard library lean. And this works well in practise, because cargo is a really good package manager.
If you want a more useful standard library, perhaps consider Go.
But it makes up for the minimalist stdlib by making it a breeze to use third-party libraries.
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To me the goals are sensible the flagship goals (for 2025H1 for example [1]) are all about DX and focus on downstream devs and their needs (all hands, Rust in the kernel).
The usual problem of "compile times" [2] (usually link times and LLVM throughput and so on) are things that are being worked on, but fundamentally they all can only be solved by caching, incremental compilation, and better developer tooling that are not language problems.
[1] https://rust-lang.github.io/rust-project-goals/2025h1/goals....
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1if5wpm/high_hopes_fo...
What do you mean by that? What is missing?
It's time to shift priorities.
Now even Java has cheap threads (Loom).
And Go even has generics. Just 20-ish years later than Java. And it's likely that more features that now Java has will trickle into Go. If Go wants to survive.
All this to say that there is no space in the market for another language which is a stupid simple Algol. Go already occupies that space. And even Go will have to add features developers want/need, if it doesn't want to get cornered out of the market.
It's not only Scala that must evolve.
Java needed Apple, Go needed Google, React needed Facebook, TypeScript needed Microsoft, etc
In this way Rust is actually a pretty unique success story in that there's no singular major tech firm pushing it
Java is one of the few languages that does have it, besides Erlang, Haskell and Go. That "even" is absolutely not warranted.
If by "cheap threads" you mean M:N threads a.k.a. fibers/green threads, Java had that on Solaris well before Go.